Support for less social people

Tag: fake

My situation is changing, and it’s time to reevaluate this blog and leave it as is. It served me well, but it does not seem to be very useful in the future. I’ve learned what there is to learn about the world, followed the inspiration I outlined in the earlier post, somewhere failed and somewhere gained. It’s time to wrap it up, carefully write down the results and cease the further investigation. It feels like a whole scientific institute is closing. So what are the reasons the project is discontinued and how far did it get?

The project was about getting me into a happy life with friends and romantic adventures. I focused my efforts more on the adventure side, as well as fulfilling the formal requirements of happy life, something you will see on TV screen. I forced some people to play roles in that image of happy life of mine. Then when it didn’t work as expected, I turned to study and understand the world I live in. I grasped how big it is, got intimidated and drew a few boundaries to only pay attention within. It helped, but then I noticed an ironic thing: my successes and failures could have been easily predicted. In fact, instead of learning by trying, one can easily estimate the result of each action just by evaluating a few basic measure of one’s own character. I evaluated those measures, and got bad results. It’s like scoring bad on a test you cannot retake. Turns out I’m not suited for any of this. All of my failures were expected, and I shouldn’t hope for any changes to the better in the future. In fact, I should be contempt with the fakes of happy life that I can force people to do as that is the best I’ll ever get.

In this framework, I probably shouldn’t try too hard anymore. This blog is mostly about trying too hard. The fakes are easy to get in multiple ways, I should just do the steepest descent to the most time-efficient and mentally painless way. In fact, even thinking too hard about this is probably overdoing it. But let me still write down what I already have. It won’t be clear what the best way is just out of what I know, but I won’t think any harder. I know enough.

So, what was those fakes I was talking about? For instance, I wanted to have friends. Turns out I have to be contempt with fakes of friends. Unlike real friends, fakes do not have some of the defining properties. In particular, they are higher maintenance. Also, they don’t have universal acceptance of you just like friends do. They typically accept only one side of you. So you need more fakes to substitute for one real friend. They also have a much shorter lifetime, so you need to find more every so often. But once you put all this work in, you can substitute one or two real friends.

Another fake is a relationship. I was supposed to look for a relationship that is, at the very least, consensual. But it turns out for a person like me only relationships available are the ones where I somehow (either by money or psychological manipulation) push the other person to put up with me. That person would never on its own want to be close to me, or anything that involves physical touch. Which means that if I still make that person accept it, it is forced and cannot be justified. Basically I cannot have normal relationships. All the attempts recorded on these pages were bound to failure, as are future attempts no matter how much I think I learn.

There are a lot of more detailed questions, like if I should make these or that people my fake friends, how do I even choose which properties of real friends are more important for me. I never thought I will have to accept a compromise like that. And also with relationship, even with no time directly commited to search for it, is there anything meaningful I can still do? Any socially acceptable way to talk about my situation without making people feel uncomfortable? Will I choose to maintain a facade of a person who is still trying or that just doesn’t matter? Who do I want to be in the end, given all of these restrictions?

Let’s be even more specific. I had this idea that being involved in a long-term project will be a change for me as before I never committed to anything until I’m good at it. So now I have committed, I became good, but the other things didn’t really change. I had another idea that one of the possible functions of fake friends is to be role models for me to learn how to deal with actual friends when I get them. The mindless imitation was something that I almost succeeded at, yet the effect is too small to measure and it takes too much effort anyways.

Out of more practical questions, I need a very specific answer how to distribute my time in the future. My priorities before were essentially the ones of the “yes man” – every time I got invited somewhere, I’d put it on the top of my priority list. That also fits the definition of procrastination. Anyways, it has to be changed.

I often invite people myself, but the principle I use to choose who to invite are very flawed. Basically, I invite all the girls regardless of their interest and guys who are somehow below me on the social ladder, so that I’m not upset if my invitation is ignored and can paternalize them anyways. I don’t see anything good in people besides how much attention do they pay to me and how much do they depend on me. I don’t have a meaningful behavior model for interacting with people I look up to.